dohboi - Complex dynamic to say the least. I recall reading a report hears ago about the EPA had to give Atlanta, Georgia, an exemption from the Clean Air regs because of all the hydrocarbons the deciduous trees emitted. And now this:

"The rapid re-forestation of great swathes of Europe has generally been seen as a good thing due to the trees' ability to soak up carbon, something that has become particularly relevant in recent decades.But the new study questions the positive impact of all these new trees on the climate. But the new study questions the positive impact of all these new trees on the climate.

The research team reconstructed 250 years of forest management history in Europe - and found that the way forests are controlled by humans can lead to far less carbon being stored than would have been the case when nature was in charge. Speaking to Science in Action on the BBC World Service, she said: "Due to the shift to conifer species, there was a warming over Europe of almost 0.12 degrees and that is caused because the conifers are darker and absorb more solar radiation."

The researchers say that the increase in temperature equates to 6% of the global warming attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. They say that is a significant amount and believe that similar impacts are likely in regions where the same type of afforestation has taken place.

Many governments have made planting trees a key part of their plans for dealing with climate change; China is building a "great green wall" of trees, set to cover around 400 million hectares when complete."

We don't need to spend money, time, and precious energy digging holes and planting trees. Gaia has stepped up to the plate and re-vegetated the planet for us. 17% additional green cover on the planet earth already . . . thanks to more CO2.

....What's very interesting is the prediction of global cooling in the 2020's followed by a very strong ramping up in temps in the 2030's. A bit of something for everyone. LOL.

That is an interesting site. Thanks. Allow to quibble with their prediction.....

The site says: "Assuming we get a new and very strong cooler La Nina sea-surface temperature pattern along with extremely low solar activity, we may see a brief cool down of the Earth’s temperature around the early 2020s."

We've just had a la Nina in 2015-16---and we had record WARM global temperatures both years. The temperature increase in 2015---the first year of the La Nina---was one of the largest ever seen in the instrumental record.

Some climatologists believe there is so much CO2 in the atmosphere now it seems to be swamping out the normal short term temperature fluctuations due to the things like La Nina.

We'll have to wait and see if they are right about significant cooling in the 2020s, but I wouldn't count on it.

What I discovered was that Messrs Harris and Mann run a website (which puts them on a par with yours truly) and occasionally get mentioned in their local newspaper, a degree of fame to which I can only aspire.

Other than that, it all becomes very vague.

We are assured they have been providing media and public bodies with weather forecasts for decades, and that may well be true, but it is remarkably short on detailing any actual credentials the two may hold.

In a profile (again in what appears to be his local newspaper) of Mr Harris, we are told:

Harris estimates he has earned more than 300 college credits from seven different colleges and university.That's nice, Cliff, but do you actually have a degree of any sort in anything? Because at the moment you are looking even less credentialed than the 31000. And that ain't good!

Frighteningly, on their website, Harris doesn't even seem to know what the initials IPCC stand for, naming it the International Panel on Climate Control. Maybe it was meant to be a joke, but you know, the thing about jokes is they are meant to be funny ... I get the feeling Harris and Mann really believe this stuff; and true believers don't often joke about their faith.

They also claim (I am not making this up) their weather forecasts are based on secret information that was divulged to them by an organisation called the Weather Science Foundation, which once employed "over 60 people to gather world wide data." Sixty people, gathering world wide data? They must have been pretty busy.

Only, those 60 people were rudely dumped on the dole queue and (oddly) don't seem to have thought their stupendously important information might have been of use to the people studying the impact of human activity on climate. Instead - I kid you not - they decided to gift the information to Mr Harris but made him promise not to use the information for 30 years.

It gets worse, though.

Further probing lead me to a name I know well ... Marc Morano. A-ha, I thought, here be bullshit, for the name of Morano is always found where crap about climate change has been posted. And verily, it was so.

Seeking out the source article, I discovered Mr Harris holding forth in - inevitably - the columns of his local newspaper, to this effect:

Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that sea levels will rise 100 cm by the year 2100, actual measurements do not bear out that conclusion.This is simply and obviously incorrect. The IPCC made no such prediction. It is simply not true.

The actual projections in AR4 can be viewed right here - about half a metre, +/- 10cm. He was writing in 2012, before you ask, and the projections in the TAR - while a bit wider - were not so spectacularly extreme as to justify the claim that the IPCC predicted sea levels will rise by a metre.

Bluntly, it is a lie. Not an exaggeration or a bit of hyperbolic rounding, but a lie. He must have known it was so, but he went ahead and published it anyway.

(But at least he got the name of the IPCC right, this time.)

Perhaps I am too good for this world but I still find it slightly shocking to actually discover someone calling themselves a climatologist simply telling lies.

Not the sort of vaguely-almost-might-be-kinda-sorta-true-if-you-look-at it-this-way-I'm-buying-the-drinks-ain't-I-so-don't-tell-me-it's-bullshit stuff that is denier stock in trade, but an outright Thing That Is Not True And Which Must Have Been Known To Be Untrue.

When the oceans transition to an anoxic biochemical regime there will be large emissions of H2S and not just CH4. H2S is an IR absorbing gas so it will act like a thermal blanket at the ocean surface. So the heat trapping in the oceans will be increased, which further intensifies the anoxic regime. It is more than likely possible to overheat the surface ocean to the point where biotic activity is terminated. This would shut down the anoxic biochemistry and act like a limiter on the runaway heat accumulation. This regime has not been seen on this planet during the previous global warming and extinction events. Humanity may be arranging the first instance.

Human global warming is unprecedented. The rate of CO2 emissions is over a magnitude larger than previous events and so the forcing regime is different. We should not expect to repeat previous events and will likely see new and exciting effects

You are missing the point. The microbes adjusted to the 5 degrees (didn't die out) and resumed pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

The long-term study revealed that in the first 10 years there was a strong increase in the carbon released from the heated plots, then a period of about seven years when the carbon release abated. But after this second calmer period, which the scientists attribute to the adjustment of the soil microbes to the warmer conditions, the release of carbon resumed its upward path.

The interesting thing is that the microbes profile changes in the direction of more digestion of humic substances that are usually not processed and thus do not actively contribute to CO2 emissions. This study has established that under warming conditions the soil CO2 emissions will not decline, but will amplify (to some degree). So we have yet another positive feedback for warming.

Subsea permafrost on East Siberian Arctic Shelf in accelerated decline

Dr. Shakhova: As we showed in our articles, in the ESAS, in some places, subsea permafrost is reaching the thaw point. In other areas it could have reached this point already. And what can happen then? The most important consequence could be in terms of growing methane emissions… a linear trend becomes exponential.

This edge between it being linear and becoming exponential is very fine and lays between frozen and thawed states of subsea permafrost. This is what we call the turning point. To me, I cannot take the responsibility in saying there is a right point between the linear and exponential yet, but following the logic of our investigation and all the evidence that we accumulated so far, it makes me think that we are very near this point. And in this particular point, each year matters.

Gas in the areas of hotspots is releasing from the seabed deposits, in which free gas has accumulated for hundreds of thousands, or even for a million years. This is why the amount of this gas and its power in releasing (due to its high pressure) is tremendous.

Dr. Shakhova: The importance of hydrates involvement in methane emissions is overestimated. The hydrate is just one form of possible reservoirs, in which pre-formed methane could be preserved in the seabed if there are proper pressure/temperature conditions; it is just the layer of hydrates composes just few hundred of meters – this is a very small fraction compared to thousands of meters of underlying gas-charged sediments in the ESAS.

Dr. Semiletov added that the 5 billion tonnes of methane that is currently in the Earth’s atmosphere represents about one percent of the frozen methane hydrate store in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. He finishes emphasising “…but we believe the hydrate pool is only a tiny fraction of the total.”

Dr. Shakhova: The second point is that the hydrates are not all of the gaseous pool that is preserved in this huge reservoir. This huge area is 2 million square kilometres. The depth of this sedimentary drape is a few kilometres, up to 20 kilometres at places. Generally speaking, it makes no difference if gas releases from decaying hydrates or from other free-gas deposits, because in the latter, gas also has accumulated for a long time without changing the volume of the reservoir; for that reason, gas became over pressurised too.

Unlike hydrates, this gas is preserved free; it is a pre-formed gas, ready to go. Over pressured, accumulated, looking for the pathway to go upwards.

In our observations, we have accumulated the evidence that this gas front is propagating in the sediments. To me as a scientist, these points are enough to be convinced that methane release in the ESAS is related to disintegration of subsea permafrost and associated destabilisation of seabed deposits whether it is hydrates or free gas accumulations.

There is no mechanism to stop permafrost disintegration in the ESAS besides shelf exposure above the sea level that would serve to freeze the gas migration paths so that they integrate with the permafrost. Before that, the amount of methane that is releasing will increase while the supply lasts.

As gas within the sedimentary basins of the ESAS have been accumulating for a million years with no way to be released earlier, the supply for currently occurring emissions is tremendous. Because the shelf area is very shallow (mean depth is less than 50 metres), a fraction of these emissions will reach the atmosphere. The problem is that this fraction would be enough to alter the climate on our planet drastically.

I had planned to leave here long before now. I knew the outcome over 10 years ago. I did my Casandra bit, and planned to be gone before the masses started to catch on. I didn't want to have to go through it all over again with the late comers.

The research has confirmed what I believed.

If you look back, Shakova isn't saying anything I haven't been saying all along. This is not an I told you so. Semiletov and Shakova saw this long ago, and the media abused them for it. (Not that I haven't been abused here for it.)

It is what it is. Live each day fully. Live as if each year is the last. Because that's where we are.

Forests play an ever-more vital role in regulating the climate. But what if rising carbon emissions actually helped them to grow and weather the impacts of global warming?

It's actually just another 'FACE' Free-Air CO2 Enrichment experiment. Hundreds have already been carried out all over the world. They show, without fail, that increasing available CO2 DOES INCREASE PLANT GROWTH measurable and over time, thus conversion of atmospheric CO2 into plant material, cellulose. It's A NEW SINK! hooray

dohboi wrote:Ummmm, the author of the Gaia concept does not agree with you here...read "Gaia's Revenge" among others. If you're going to cite a theory, at least be up on the latest please.

Latest? Lovelock recanted his doom in 2012, long after he wrote his alarmist treatise.

In an April 2012 interview, aired on MSNBC, Lovelock stated that he had been "alarmist", using the words “All right, I made a mistake,” about the timing of climate change and noted the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the book The Weather Makers as examples of the same kind of alarmism.

You need to keep up.

He criticizes environmentalists for treating global warming like a religion.[38]“It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion,” Lovelock observed“I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use … The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon dioxide) in the air.”[38]

(And just to point out, you are the one who brings up the Gaia hypothesis to support your argument, Gaia being a Greek goddess, then you try to portray environmentalism disparagingly as a religion...what a strange and curious way of arguing. )

But a major climate change study published Thursday relied not on models but experimental data — a 26-year record of observations, no less — to reach a conclusion perhaps just as worrying. The research, tracking the emissions of carbon from artificially heated plots of a forest in Massachusetts, reinforces fears about the possibility of a climate change “feedback” involving the planet’s soils, one that could pile on top of and substantially worsen the ongoing warming trend triggered by the burning of fossil fuels.

“"If you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while counting your money"”

onlooker, its the same study dohboi referenced. If I am not mistaken, the conclusion (that soils release C02 due to warming) was based on an experimental plot heated 5% above normal . In another words, the positive feedback depends on a state we are not nearly in and probably couldn't be achieved for decades . . . or a century.

Long before then we will have run out of oil to power our industrial infrastructure. And the cars will have stopped. And emissions will have stopped.